Saturday, August 27, 2011

Virgil Finlay

"Virgil Finlay is widely regarded as one of the world’s greatest illustrators of science fiction and fantasy. Born on July 23, 1914 in Rochester, New York, Finlay took to art early in life, selling his first illustration at the age of 21 to Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright for the magazine’s December 1935 issue. Over the next 35 years he completed more than 2,500 drawings and paintings, an achievement made even more impressive by the time required to execute his painstaking and labor-intensive pieces. To give his black and white drawings a photorealistic look, Finlay developed a unique style that combined stippling with scratchboard techniques (scratchboard being a type of art board manufactured with a white clay coating that accepts ink and can be cut away, allowing artists to “scratch” white lines into black areas). The result was an image so detailed that pulp editors were initially hesitant to accept his work, fearing that the tiny dots would not reproduce on their coarse paper stock. Fortunately they did, and the mesmerizing visions that Finlay brought to the page proved to be tremendously popular with readers across the decades, from the heyday of the pulps in the late 1930s to the opening of the Space Age. Working to the end, Finlay died of cancer in January of 1971, just before Donald M. Grant published Virgil Finlay, the first of many books celebrating his unique talent." - quote source

An excellent six page article on Virgil Finlay from a June 1978 issue of Starlog magazine can be found here.

hi, i love this blog, and i just wanted to show these cards that i discovered called dinosaur attack cards. you probably already know about them, but just in case, maybe you could do a post about them: http://www.i-mockery.com/halloween/bag/pics/dinosaurs-attack3.jpg

Thank you for these, I also had not seen some of them. Virgil Finlay is a pleasure that I haven't indulged in for a long time. I found your blog while looking for some Toho Godzilla pix, and stayed for a banquet of monster pleasure.

Limpey - There's a lot of Finlay art here I've been meaning to share on Monster Brains for years, I'm glad to have shown work not familiar to you.

Greg - Thank you.

Paul - Thanks for the suggestion, funny that you bring this up as I was thinking about putting these on Monster Brains just the other week. I'm a great fan of the cards, I have a few opened packages around somewhere. Did you know Tim Burton had plans to make a film version of them but did Mars Attacks instead? Another card series you can expect to see here is The Outer Limits, along with a lot of other interesting Outer Limits imagery.

I was looking around on the net the other day and I noticed some artwork that caught my attention, The style looked familiar but it really got my brain working as to where I had seen this style before, and then it hit me, as a child spending time at my grandparents house I used to love reading old copies of Weird Tales that they had a collection of, aong with various other comics and such from the 40's and early 50's But as a child what I really loved about these books was the fantastic cover art done by Virgil Finlay, I remember pleasant sunday afternoons full of daydreams of space adventures and evil creatures and ghost stories all inspired by the wonderful art of Virgil Finlay. Thank you so much for posting these, They bring back alot of great memories.

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Monster Brains is copyright Aeron Alfrey 2006 - 2013. All artworks posted at Monster Brains are the property of their respective copyright owners. Any works posted against the wishes of the copyright owner will be removed from Monster Brains by request. I can be contacted at evilenergy@yahoo.com